Dads Against the Divorce Industry

DA*DI is devoted to reinstating the societal valuation of Marriage and the traditional, nuclear American Family, with particular emphasis on the essential role of FATHERS.

DA*DI offers contemporary reports and commentary on culture; its aberrations and its heroes.

Dr. Sanford Braver:"Divorced Dads: Shattering
the Myths"

Myth 1: Divorced Dads Are Deadbeat Dads

"Where would such
a damning belief arise from? From the most respected data gathering
organization in the country, the U.S. Census Bureau
..."

"First, similarly to the limitation
of the U.S. Census Bureau survey on child-support compliance,
Furstenburg's analysis (ff) does not distinguish between
never-married families and the divorced
families."

"Virtually all the researchers who arrived
at the conclusion that fathers are over whelmingly not paying child
support used only one source of data in arriving at their findings:
the custodial mothers."

Myth 2: Divorced Dads Are Runaway Dads:

"This myth spins
as follows: After divorce, fathers inevitably lose interest in their
children, proving the old saying 'Out of sight, out of mind.' ...
This myth can be largely attributed to one of the most influential
sociologists in this country, Frank Furstenburg, Ph.D."

Myth 3: Divorced Fathers Impoverish Their Former Wives and
Children

This belief grew primarily out of the hugely
influential 1985 book, "The Divorce Revolution: The unexpected
Social and Economic Consequences for Women and Children in
America, by well-respected sociologist Lenore Weitzman, Ph.D.,
which purported to show that women (and children) suffered a 73%
decline in their standard of living post-divorce, while men enjoyed
a 42 percent increase."

Having learned
after dealing with more than 3000 Dads and second families that the
"deadbeat dad" label is so odious to Fathers, DA*DI offers two
tables demonstrating that this obscene myth is absolutely false:

In one of the many anecdotes Dr. Braver shares, he tells
of attending a 1988 conference at Arizona State on child support
collections. Dr. Braver decided to comment on the problem of
"trusting official records", "how official database statistics can
be misleading" and then he provided his own results:

"At this
point, the moderator stood up and said, 'You know, I've heard about
your findings. Our panel was discussing this very issue, of
differences between mother's and father's answers, over lunch. And
what we concluded was if the mother tells you one thing and the
father tells you something else, then the father is a goddamned
liar.'

"This belief is fueled by the writings of several
respected gender scholars (emphasis added) ... who have each
come to the conclusion that fathers are favored in divorce
settlements ... because laws ... are written by men
for men."

Myth 5: Divorced Fathers Have It Easy Emotionally After Divorce;
Only Their Ex-Wives and Children are Distressed

"Fathers are
Portrayed as personally fulfilled after divorce, in marked contrast
to the mounting depression and gloom that envelops their
overburdened ex-wives - and their troubled kids. ... it is in fact
mothers who fare substantially better emotionally than
fathers."

Myth 6: Fathers Initiate Most of the Family Breakups, Abandoning
Their Families and Their Responsibilities

"In this portrait,
bad dads quickly lose interest in being faithful to one wife
and working hard to preserve the family unit. While wives sacrifice
everything for the betterment of the husbands and children, many
fathers are just too immature to handle the responsibilities in the
same way."

"The 'dirty little secret' of
divorce research: The result that women initiate the preponderance
(63 - 75%) of modern divorces is hardly unique to our investigation
... Rather, there is not a single study which doesn't find
almost the same proportions. ... Few policymakers in the divorce
arena know or even suspect the finding."

At DA*DI we
have researched the myths which Dr. Braver so emminently refutes for
the past five years. To his results we would like to offer these
additional findings:

It seems that the child support recovery
program (IV-D) has lost its constitutional perspective as elaborated
by the Supreme Court as recently as 1983 and later,
i.e.;

"A parent's right to the
preservation of his relationship with his child derives from the
fact that the parent's achievement of a rich and rewarding life is
likely to depend significantly on his ability to participate in the
rearing of his children. A child's corresponding right to protection
from interference in the relationship derives from the psychic
importance to him of being raised by a loving, responsible, reliable
adult." Franz v. United States, 707 F.2d 582, 595-599 (U.S. Ct. App.
D.C. Circuit 1983)

The following excerpts from a
1996 publication of the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee makes
several important points. (1) The federal government has been
steadily expanding its role in enforcing child support, without
regard for non-custodial parental access to children, since 1975.
(2) The program's success, as measured by growth, is largely
illusory because it has grown by expanding its umbrella to include
private collection services, and non-AFDC parents. (3) The
federal-state child support recovery effort has had little or no
impact on reducing poverty. (4) The greatest incentive for the
states to continue the program may have nothing to do with a concern
for "the children". This telling sentence in the report says it all:
"And yet, most States, including those that spend up to three or
four times as much per dollar of collections as more efficient
States, still make a profit on the program." For the State of Iowa,
in 1994, this amounted to a tidy "profit" of $12.4 million - which
it can spend any way it chooses.

The 1975 legislation (Public Law 93-647) added a new
part D to title IV of the Social Security Act. This statute, as
amended, authorizes Federal matching funds to be used for enforcing
support obligations by locating nonresident parents, establishing
paternity, establishing child support awards, and collecting money.
Since 1981, child support agencies have also been permitted to
collect spousal support on behalf of custodial parents, and in 1984
they were required to petition for medical support as part of most
child support orders.

Basic responsibility for administering the program is left to
States, but the Federal Government plays a major role in: dictating
the major design features of State programs; funding, monitoring and
evaluating State programs; providing technical assistance; and
giving direct assistance to States in locating absent parents and
obtaining support payments. The program requires the provision of
child support enforcement services for both AFDC and non-AFDC
families and requires States to publicize frequently, through public
service announcements, the availability of child support enforcement
services, together with information about the application fee and a
telephone number or address to obtain additional information. Local
family and domestic courts and administrative agencies handle the
actual establishment and enforcement of child support obligations
according to Federal, State, and local laws.

With minor exceptions, the child support program does not provide
services aimed at other issues between parents, such as property
settlement, custody, and access to children. These issues are
handled by local courts with the help of private attorneys. ...

Clearly, although the IV-D program has been growing steadily
since 1978, and although its performance on many measures of child
support has been improving, the improvement appears to have had only
modest impact on the national picture. How can these two trends be
reconciled?

The last panel of table 9-9 suggests an answer. This panel shows
collections by the Federal-State program as a percentage of overall
national child support payments. In 1978, less than one-fourth of
child support payments were collected through the IV-D program. This
percentage, however, has increased every year since 1978. By 1991,
more than 60 percent of all child support payments were made through
the IV-D program. The implication of this trend is that the IV-D
program may be recruiting more and more cases from the private
sector, bringing them into the public sector, providing them with
subsidized services (or substituting Federal spending for State
spending), but not greatly improving child support collections.
Whatever the explanation, it seems that improved effectiveness of
the IV-D program has not led to significant improvement of the
Nation's child support performance.

As measured either by expenditures or total collections, the
Federal-State program has grown about tenfold since 1978.

When Congress enacted the child support program in 1975, the
floor debate shows that members of the House and Senate supported
the program primarily because retaining AFDC collections would help
offset AFDC expenditures.

The point here is that although AFDC collections are growing,
non-AFDC collections are growing much faster. And since the State
and Federal Governments receive virtually no direct reimbursement
for non-AFDC expenditures, the child support program loses more and
more money every year.

As shown in table 9-1 above, AFDC collections have in fact been
rising every year since 1978, growing from less than $0.5 billion in
that year to nearly $2.7 billion in 1995. Equally important, the
child support agencies collected a level of payments on behalf of
AFDC parents that equalled 13.6 percent of all AFDC benefits in
1995.

Of course, it will be recalled that despite this impressive rise
in AFDC collections and cost offset, the overall impact of the child
support program on taxpayers is negative. As shown in table 9-5,
taxpayers lost over $0.8 billion on the program in 1995 and the loss
has increased every year since 1988.

By 1989 the overall ``savings'' in the combined program went
negative. For the first time that year, Federal losses exceeded
State gains--by $77 million. The net losses have increased almost
every year, reaching $826 million in 1995.

The point here is that although AFDC collections are growing,
non-AFDC collections are growing much faster. And since the State
and Federal Governments receive virtually no direct reimbursement
for non-AFDC expenditures, the child support program loses more and
more money every year. Why, then, critics ask, should the Federal
Government encourage greater expenditures by providing incentives
for non-AFDC collections. Ignoring for the moment possible social
benefits from the non-AFDC Program and based entirely on a public
finance perspective, some critics argue that non-AFDC incentives
encourage inefficiency.

(NOTE:) Although the number of families with a mother who has
divorced has tripled since 1970, the number with a mother who has
never married has increased fifteenfold from 248,000 to 3,829,000.

Another good measure of child support performance is the impact
of collections on poverty. In 1991, 1.26 million (24 percent) of the
5.3 million women and men rearing children alone who were supposed
to receive child support payments had incomes below the poverty
level. If full payment had been made to these custodial parents and
if none of these families had received welfare payments, only
140,000 of them would have received enough income from child support
payments to put them above the poverty level (U.S. Bureau of the
Census, 1995, pp. 7 & 26). Thus, the potential of child support
to greatly reduce poverty appears to be modest.

Defenders of child support financing respond by pointing out that
allowing States to profit from the program makes it very popular
with State policymakers who control funding of the State share of
expenditures. Without financing arrangements favorable to State
interests, according to this view, the child support program would
not have posted the impressive gains that have characterized the
program since its inception in 1975.

The method of financing child support enforcement has received
considerable attention in recent years. Perhaps the most important
issue is that States have little incentive to control their
administrative spending. The last column of table 9-4 presents a
measure of State program efficiency obtained by dividing total
collections by total administrative expenses. The table shows the
dramatic differences among States in how much child support is
collected for each dollar of administrative expenditure--a crude
measure of efficiency-- ranging from only $1.78 in Arizona to $8.58
in Pennsylvania. And yet, most States, including those that spend up
to three or four times as much per dollar of collections as more
efficient States, still make a profit on the program.

Table 9-5 shows one consequence of child support's financing
system. The first two columns of the table show the net impact of
program financing on the Federal and State governments respectively.
The Federal Government has lost money on child support every year
since 1979, and the losses have grown every year since 1984.
Overall, losses have jumped sharply from $43 million in 1979 to
$1.257 billion in 1995.

State governments by contrast have made a profit on the
program every year. In 1979, the first year for which data are
available, States cleared $244 million on child support. By 1995,
States cleared $431 million. As Federal losses have mounted, State
profits have increased.